Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, August 04, 2016

Futurology Is Crappy Late-Nite Infomercials As Religion

Upgraded and adapted from an exchange with my friend JimF in the Moot, this paragraph dips into the anti-futurological well that has been the life of this blog for over twelve years by now, themes which have been eclipsed for nearly a year by an idiotically annoying primary contest and the GOP hijacking by killer clown Donald Trump (in the context of a distressing illness I don't really talk about very much but which has been rather preoccupying).

I must say one of my favorite futurological genres -- it usually fancies
itself deeply Philosophical (you can feel the capital letter) or, you know, "bioethical" -- consists of
some extended wish-fulfillment fantasizing but prefaced by stern and Very Serious
admonitions of the form: "many think that having magical powers, wealth
beyond the dreams of avarice, or eternal youth would be terrible, but I
bravely insist these daydreams would be awesome." These brave slayings of "naysaying" dragons do a kind of meta-marketing double-duty: investing the corrupt, sclerotic, fraudulent, unsustainable, predatory for-profit status quo with avid emancipatory fire while at once investing the compulsorily cheerful, drearily dull day-dreamer with the presumably daring, can-do, go-getterific zeal of the champion of our age, the entrepreneurial innovator and/or Thought Leader, that stale, pale, male exemplar of upward fail. Needless to say, this
daring adolescent onanistic PR exercise is usually coupled with a selective
skimming from some highly qualified and incompletely understood research result
which is thereupon amplified beyond recognition, re-narrativized as a stepping
along the road to some techno-transcendental aspiration, and then slapped
with a prediction (cheap sustainable superabundance, cures to all
diseases including "aging as a disease," artificial super-intelligence,
total control of matter) with an arrival-time snugly
close-enough-to-tap-into-greed too-distant-to-demand-accountability,
say, In! Twenty! Years! Although this entirely content-free advertorial ritual offers up zero scientific merit, policy substance, theoretical insight, pedagogical clarity, or progressive change to point out any of these dimensions of the scam is to invite charges of negativity, luddism, post-modern relativism, political correctness or, hilariously enough, hostility to science.

2 comments:

> [T]his daring adolescent onanistic PR exercise is usually> coupled with a selective skimming from some highly qualified> and incompletely understood research result which is thereupon> amplified beyond recognition, re-narrativized as a stepping> along the road to some techno-transcendental aspiration, and> then slapped with a prediction (cheap sustainable superabundance,> cures to all diseases including "aging as a disease," artificial> super-intelligence, total control of matter). . .

Transhumanism and the Reductio ad Zoltan.

You know, I always thought that the Extropians weretin-eared in their reception of John C. Wright's _GoldenTranscendence_ trilogy; apparently IEET was equally tin-earedin its reception a few years ago of Zoltan Istvan's_The Transhumanist Wager_ (which I admittedly have never read).

There have been glowing reviews at the IEET of Zoltan Istvan’s_The Transhumanist Wager_. This will not be one of those. As I will argue,if you care about core transhumanist concerns, such as research intopushing out the limits of human mortality, little could be worse than thepublication of Istvan’s novel. To put it sharply in terms of his so-calledFirst Law of Transhumanism “A transhumanist must safeguard his own existenceabove all else”; Istvan, by creating a work that manages to disparage andthreaten nearly every human community on earth has likely **shortened thelength of your life**. . .

Futurism has always contained within itself a hatred of the past,and everything we have inherited from the past, religion yes,but also culture, art, architecture, literature. . . [T]he versionof transhumanism he presents is nothing but a ripped off andupside down version of fundamentalist Christianity. In fusing theso-called militancy and cultural illiteracy of the New Atheismwith a religiously infused interpretation of transhumanism, . . .Istvan. . . has merely created a new form of fundamentalism. . .

Where I am left is wracking my brain in figuring out the originsof these fascist trends in in transhumanism. . .

The more I think on it, the more it seems that the kinds offascist transhumanism seen in. . . Istvan is a result of aquite narrow understanding of the meaning of **technology**. . .In a sense all transhumanism, even clearly progressive transhumanism,suffers from a kind of technological fetishism. . .

On the one hand there is the collision of our daydreams with thesheer complexity and surprises that confront us when faced withreality as shown to us by science. We have inherited aspirationsregarding human life from religion and political philosophywhich may or may not have a technologically engineerable solution,and there is no way to know in advance if they do or do not.Just because we can dream of something does not mean it istechnologically or economically possible, or may only provepossible in ways utterly different from our initial dreams . . .

The danger here is that the scientifically probable suffersin comparison to the enchantingly possible. . .[For Some Value Of "possible" ;-> ]. . .

Techno-progressives need to pay more attention to [the] spaceimmediately in front of us. . .

This is a much better strategy than engaging in a power fantasyin which your personal survival has become a political question,nothing in the world is more important than this survival,and what you believe most puts your survival in question isthe fact that the whole world is your enemy. . .====

There has been some ink spilt lately at the IEET over a new movementthat goes by the Tolkienesque name, I kid you not, of the dark enlightenment,also called neo-reactionaries. . .

What distinguishes neo-reactionaries from run of the mill ditto headsor military types with a taste for Dock Martins or short pants is thatthey tend to be latte drinking Silicon Valley nerds who have some connectionto both the tech and trans-humanist communities.

That should get this audience’s attention. . .

Peter Thiel, who had a net worth of 1.5 billion and was into, amongother things, working closely with organizations such as the NSAthrough a data mining firm he owned -- we’ll call it Palantir(damned Frodo Baggins again!). . . serves as a deep pocketfor groups like the Tea Party. . .

[T]he heroes of the dark enlightenment are laid out in the formatof Dungeons and Dragons or Pokémon cards (I can’t make this stuff up). . .[T]he most unfunny and disturbing part of the movement. . .[is] its open racism and obsession with the 19th century pseudo-scienceof dysgenics. . .

Dark enlightenment types and progressives are confronting the samefrustration while having diametrically opposed goals. It is not somuch that Washington is too powerful as it is that the power it hasis embedded in a system, which. . . is feckless and corrupt.

Neo-reactionaries tend to see this as a product of too much democracy,whereas progressives will counter that there is not enough. . .

[T]he idea that technology offered an alternative to the lumberingbureaucracy of state and corporations is something embedded deepin the foundation myth of Silicon Valley. The use of Moore’s Law asa bridge to personalized communication technology was supposed toliberate us from the apparatchiks of the state and the corporation --remember Apple’s “1984” commercial? [A cynical piece of propagandafrom a cynical company.]